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About the Book

We live in a world confronted by mounting environmental problems; increasing global deforestation and desertification, loss of species diversity, pollution and global warming. In everyday life people mourn the loss of valued landscapes and urban spaces. Underlying these problems are conflicting priorities and values. Yet dominant approaches to policy-making seem ill-equipped to capture the various ways in which the environment matters to us.

Environmental Values introduces readers to these issues by presenting, and then challenging, two dominant approaches to environmental decision-making, one from environmental economics, the other from environmental philosophy. The authors present a sustained case for questioning the underlying ethical theories of both of these traditions. They defend a pluralistic alternative rooted in the rich everyday relations of humans to the environments they inhabit, providing a path for integrating human needs with environmental protection through an understanding of the narrative and history of particular places. The book examines the implications of this approach for policy issues such as biodiversity conservation and sustainability.

Written in a clear and accessible style for an interdisciplinary audience, this volume will be ideal for student use in environmental courses in geography, economics, philosophy, politics and sociology.

Reviews

Environmental Values covers an extraordinary amount of ground with clarity and precision. It distils key ideas from leading thinkers in environmental philosophy into one tightly argued volume. It offers both careful, accurate summaries of existing positions and an original, stuimulating position of its own. I highly recommend it. Clare Palmer, Geographical Journal

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Values and the Environment 1. Environments and values 1.1. Living from the world 1.2. Living in the world 1.3 Living with the world 2. Addressing Value Conflicts 2.1 Value conflicts 2.2 The distribution of goods and harms 2.3 Addressing conflicts

Part Two: A New Environmental Ethic? Chapter 6: The moral considerability of the non-human world 1. New ethics for old? 2. Moral considerability 3. Extending the boundaries of moral considerability 4. New theories for old? Chapter 7 Environment, meta-ethics and intrinsic value 1. Meta-ethics and normative ethics 2. Intrinsic value 3. Is the rejection of meta-ethical realism compatible with an environmental ethic? 4. Objective value and the flourishing of living things 5. Environmental ethics through thick and thin Chapter 8. Nature and the natural 1. Valuing the ‘natural’ 2. The complexity of ‘nature’ 2.1 Some distinctions 2.2 Natural and artificial 2.3 Natural and cultural 2.4 Nature as wilderness 3. The value of natural things 4. Nature Conservation 4.1 A paradox? 5. On restoring the value of nature 6. Restitutive ecology 7. History, narrative and environmental goods

Part 3: The narratives of nature Chapter 9. Nature and narrative 1. Three walks 2. History and processes as sources of value 3. Going back to nature? 4. Old worlds and new 5. Narrative and nature Chapter 10. Biodiversity: biology as biography 1. The itemising approach to environmental values 1.1 The nature of biodiversity - conceptual clarifications 1.2 The attractions of itemisation 2. Biodiversity and environmental sustainability 3. Time, history and biodiversity 4. Environmental ethics and the dangers of moral trumps Chapter 11. Sustainability and human well-being 1. Sustainability: of what, for whom and why? 2. Economic accounts of sustainability 3. Sustainability: weak and strong 4. Human well-being and substitutability 5. From preferences to needs 6. Narrative, human-well being and sustainability 7. Sustainability without capital Chapter 12. Public decisions and environmental goods 1. Procedural rationality and deliberative institutions 2. Decisions in context 3. Responsibility and character 4. What makes for good decisions?

About the Authors

John O'Neill is Professor of Political Economy at The University of Manchester.

Alan Holland is Emeritus Professor of Applied Philosophy at Lancaster University

Andrew Light is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Public Affairs at the University of Washington, Seattle.

About the Series

This series introduces core topics for environmental study and presents unparalleled interdisciplinary perspectives on issues of environmental concern. Focusing on human-environmental interrelationships, these concise, engaging, user-friendly texts respond particularly well to the demands of modular learning. Each text in the series features: